Living Our Dream

Belmont Mansion

Mount Juliet (Nashville), TN - Events of Monday, June 23, 2014

Although we had numerous items on our list of possible things to do in the Nashville area, we were planning to take it easy and only do a couple of them. For one thing, Cedar Creek Corps of Engineers campground where we were staying was located about 20 or 25 miles northeast of Nashville, so almost all our sightseeing possibilities were pretty far away.

One of the things we were thinking about doing on Monday was taking a day trip about an hour south of Nashville to Franklin, TN. Franklin is a small, quaint town where there is a Civil War battlefield, a historic downtown area, and a couple of historic houses to tour. We were in the process of making a list of things we wanted to see there when we discovered Franklin was holding the Tennessee Senior Olympics all week. Not wanting to get our sightseeing plans tangled up with the 1,800+ participants and all the onlookers at the Senior Olympics, we decided to save Franklin for another visit.

We moved on to Plan B, which was to see Belmont Mansion. Belmont Mansion is located on the campus of Belmont University on the southwestern side of Nashville.

Belmont Mansion

Admission to the mansion is $12 for adults, $11 for seniors and military and $10.50 for AAA members. The mansion is open Mondays through Saturdays from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. and Sundays from 1:00 to 4:00.

We were surprised at how many people were there on a weekday. Fortunately, the tours are run very efficiently; and we only had to wait a few minutes before our tour started.

In 1839, Adelicia Hayes married Isaac Franklin, who was a wealthy slave trader and plantation owner and who was 28 years her senior. The couple had 4 children, none of whom survived past age 11.

Isaac Franklin died unexpectedly in 1846; and Adelicia inherited from him a plantation in Tennessee, 8,700 acres of plantations in Louisiana, 50,000 acres of undeveloped land in Texas, stocks, bonds, and 750 slaves. The estimated value of the estate was $1 million, which was a LOT of money back then. She had become the wealthiest woman in Tennessee and one of the wealthiest in the whole country.

In 1849, Adelicia was remarried to Joseph Acklen, who was an attorney from Alabama. Together they built Belmont Mansion (originally called Belle Monte) as a summer home to escape the heat of their plantations in Louisiana. Belmont, which sat on 180 acres of land, was completed in 1853. It had numerous outbuildings, gardens, a 200-foot long greenhouse and conservatory, a water tower to provide water for all the plants, a zoo, and a guest house that in addition to guest quarters also contained an art gallery and bowling alley.

Our tour started with a brief stop in the entry hall then went to the second floor where the master and children's bedrooms were located. Adelicia and her second husband had 6 children, 4 of whom survived to adulthood.

Master bedroom

Off the master bedroom was the trunk room. Back in those times, ladies' dresses contained yards and yards of fabric. There were no closets yet, much less the type of large walk-in closets we have today, and the dresses would have been too large and too heavy to hang in the armoir. Therefore, ladies' dresses were typically folded and placed in trunks for storage. By the way, that is the original paint on the floor of the trunk room shown below.

Trunk room with original paint on the floor

One room on the second floor was used as a schoolroom where tutors home schooled the children. The table in the schoolroom contained items that would have been typically used for educational purposes back in the day. When we saw the slate with the math problems, we were reminded how much simpler math was back then before New Math and Common Core.

Educational items in the schoolroom

After touring the upstairs, we went back downstairs. The large salon at the bottom of the graceful stairs was originally the back porch. The porch was enclosed to create the salon, which was used for entertaining, and the stairs were added during a renovation that was done by the Acklens in 1859. There was originally a compact, spiral staircase to the second floor.

First floor salon that was originally the back porch

Staircase to the second floor

The first floor has a large dining room, which could accommodate large dinner parties.

Formal dining room

Also on the first floor is the parlor. The parlor would have been used by the family and for entertaining close friends.

Parlor

The painting behind the piano in the photo above is of three of the four children Adelicia had with her first husband. The fourth wasn't included in the painting because he only survived a day or two after birth. As we said, none of these children survived to adulthood.

Three of the four children from Adelicia's first marriage

Fortunately, Belmont survived the Civil War intact. Only the grounds were damaged during a two-week occupation by Union troops prior to the Battle of Nashville in 1864.

Adelicia's second husband, Joseph, died in 1863 during the Civil War while in Louisiana managing Adelicia's plantations. By the way, Joseph Acklen did an excellent job with the plantations. He tripled the value of Adelicia's holdings from its original $1 million.

In 1867, Adelicia married Dr. William Cheatham, a prominent Nashville physician. The couple eventually separated, and Adelicia began spending more and more time in Washington, DC.

In 1887, Adelicia sold Belmont to a land developer and moved to Washington permanently. Later that year, she came down with pneumonia while on a shopping trip to New York and died.

Two women from Philadelphia bought Belmont and opened a girls' school in 1890. The school later merged with Ward Seminary and became Ward-Belmont. In 1952, the school changed hands and became today's Belmont University, which is a Christian, co-ed, liberal arts school.

The tour guides, who were probably students at the university, were excellent. They were very knowledgeable and enthusiastic. They knew the history of the house and of the family very well, and the way they told the Adelicia's story made her seem very real.

From Belmont we headed back toward Cedar Creek. On the way, we stopped for lupper at a Mexican restaurant located a short distance down the road from the campground called Cinco de Mayo. There were always a lot of cars there every time we passed, and they got pretty good online reviews.

Cinco de Mayo Mexican restaurant

We started off with traditional corn chips and salsa.

Paul sampling the corn chips and salsa

Cinco de Mayo has lunch specials for about $5 to $7 and dinners for around $7 to $13. We both had a combo platter with a taco, a chile relleno and a beef enchilada that also included rice and refried beans for $8.25.

We thought the food at Cinco de Mayo was only average. The cheese they used was excellent, but the beef in the taco, enchilada and chile relleno was a little bland and needed salt. The salsa had pretty good flavor, but it was a little runny. We also like more cilantro in our salsa.

The weather forecast was calling for an 80% chance of rain on Tuesday, so we planned to hang around the campground. We had more activities scheduled for the remainder of our stay in the Nashville area, so stay tuned.

Memphis to Nashville

Mount Juliet, TN - Events of Tuesday, June 17 to Saturday, June 21, 2014

We made a Walmart run on Tuesday, then relaxed around the RV park and watched barges on the river the rest of the day. We had planned to do some sightseeing on Wednesday, but we found out what we wanted to see was only open on the weekend. Oh well, maybe next time. We ended up relaxing some more.

On Thursday, we did some of our pre-departure chores in the morning, then headed to Memphis for lupper at the Bar-B-Q Shop one more time. We both had chopped pork dinner plates again with slaw and potato salad for our sides. Yum!

Chopped pork barbecue at the Bar-B-Q Shop

On Friday morning, we headed east on I-40 to Nashville to the Cedar Creek Corps of Engineers campground in Mount Juliet, TN located to the northeast of Nashville. We stayed at Cedar Creek the first time we were in Nashville back in 2011. It was supposed to be about a 4½-hour drive from Memphis to Cedar Creek, but it took us almost 5 hours because of traffic slowdowns for two separate accidents and because we had to stop for fuel. We arrived around 1:30.

Cedar Creek has about 60 sites with water and electric (30/50 amp) only. The sites are a good bit closer together than we usually see in Corps of Engineer campgrounds, but the sites are still bigger than many private campgrounds. There are about half dozen lakefront sites and another half dozen across the road from those that have much wider spacing; but the lakefront sites are hard to get on weekends, and they have too much shade for our rooftop satellite dish. The photos below shows our site and some of the other sites in our circle.

Our site at Cedar Creek COE campground

View of some of the other sites in our circle

The cost for the sites at Cedar Creek is $20 a night except for the ones that are down by the lake. Those are $24. America the Beautiful passes are honored for a 50% discount off the regular rates.

We hung around the campground the rest of the day on Friday and spent a little time on the internet researching things to do. We had a strong Verizon 4G signal.

Margery had made an appointment for a haircut on Saturday morning. Paul dropped her off and went to Lowe's to see if he could get a pin to repair the hinge of the latch on one of our storage bay doors. Getting a haircut at an unknown salon is always a big question mark, but this gal did a good job.

After returning to the campground and successfully repairing the latch, we drove about 30 minutes east to Lebanon, TN to have barbecue for lupper at Tom's Blue Moon Bar-B-Que. We went there the last time we stayed at Cedar Creek, and the barbecue was pretty good.

Tom's Blue Moon Bar-B-Que

Tom's has smoked pork, brisket, turkey, chicken, ribs and bologna. Yes, they smoke bologna and serve it with barbecue sauce. We had a sample once at a barbecue joint in Memphis, and it was actually pretty good. Sandwiches at Blue Moon are $5 to $6 and include slaw. Dinner plates are $9 to $11 and include two sides and flat cornbread or Texas toast. Ribs are $13 for a half slab and $22 for a full slab and include two sides and flat cornbread or Texas toast.

We both had pulled pork dinner plates. Margery had slaw and home made potato chips for her sides, and Paul had slaw and potato salad. We both had flat cornbread, which is a cornbread-type batter fried up like pancakes.

Pulled pork dinner plate with slaw, potato salad and flat cornbread

Margery about to sample the flat cornbread

The pork was not very smoky, but it was nice and moist and tender. The cole slaw was so-so, but the chips and potato salad were very good as was the flat cornbread.

Tom's has "Sweet and Sassy" and "Sweet and Spicy" barbecue sauces. Both are molasses-based, and as the names suggest, both are quite sweet. They also have South Carolina mustard-based sauce that is on the tart side, so we mixed some of that in with the molasses-based sauce to cut down on the sweetness. We always like it when there is more than one type of barbecue sauce because we can blend it to suit our own taste.

With our bellies full, we headed back to the motor home to relax the rest of the weekend. We don't have a lot of sightseeing planned for our week's stay in the Nashville area, but we have a couple of things we are considering doing. Look for our next post to see what we decided on.

More Pink Palace

West Memphis, AR - Events of Monday, June 16, 2014

After finishing the natural history section of the Pink Palace Museum, we headed to the second floor where there were exhibits on the human history of the Memphis area.

Native Americans first arrived in the area about 11,000 years ago. They hunted and gathered food along the fertile Mississippi River and its tributaries. Over time, they began to stay for longer periods. They began to build more permanent houses and started farming. The first villages began to appear about 2,500 years ago. The museum had a display of Mississippian pottery and tools.

Europeans first came to the area in 1541. We learned about Hernando De Soto's expedition this past February when we visited the De Soto National Memorial in Bradenton, FL. Click here to read about that visit and the De Soto expedition.

When French explorers arrived in 1673, most of the farms and villages of the Mississippian people were gone, and swamps and forests had reclaimed much the land. The Native American population had been decimated by disease introduced by the Europeans. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, European settlers began to arrive in the area in larger numbers and pushed the few remaining Indians out.

Artifacts of early European explorers and settlers

Margery checking out tools the settlers used to build log cabins

Re-creation of a one-room log cabin

The city of Memphis was chartered in 1826. The demand for cotton was growing because the invention of the cotton gin in the late 1700s brought down the price of cotton and the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800s brought down the price of fabric made from cotton. In the 1840s, Memphis was undergoing a boom as cheap land for growing cotton and the presence of the Mississippi River for transportation attracted even more new residents. By 1860, Memphis rivaled St. Louis and New Orleans.

Not only did the Industrial Revolution make fabric and clothing less expensive, but it also made possible the manufacture of affordable furniture. Memphis had a growing and prosperous middle class. The photo below shows a typical, early Victorian, middle-class parlor.

Victorian-era furnishings and clothing

Tennessee seceded from the Union in 1861 and briefly became a Confederate stronghold until it was captured by the Union in 1862.

Civil War display

Memphis was occupied by Union forces for the remainder of the war. Because of its strategic location on the Mississippi, Memphis became a Union supply base. As a result of the war and the Reconstruction period that followed, the economy of Memphis became depressed.

Just as the city finally began to slowly recover from the aftermath of the war, yellow fever epidemics in the 1870s further devastated the economy. Things got so bad, the city declared bankruptcy in 1879 and lost its city charter. Memphis emerged from bankruptcy in the 1880s and was rechartered in 1893. Memphis entered the 1900s as a fairly prosperous center for the cotton trade.

In our last post, we mentioned how Clarance Saunders began building the Pink Palace mansion in 1922. Building of the mansion was made possible by Suanders' success in the grocery business. Clarance Saunders had established a large grocery wholesale company in Memphis in the early 1900s; and in 1916, he decided to open his own grocery store which he called the Piggly Wiggly. The museum has a replica of the original Piggly Wiggly Saunders built on Jefferson Avenue in Mmephis.

Replica of the first Piggly Wiggly

Piggly Wiggly was the first true self-service grocery store. Customers, who were given shopping baskets, entered the store through a turnstile, made their way up and down the aisles picking up groceries as they went, and ended up at the check-out counter at the front of the store. By 1922, Piggly Wiggly had 1241 stores. The concept was so successful, other grocery stores quickly entered the self service market.

Inside the Piggly Wiggly

As we also mentioned in our last post, Saunders encountered financial difficulty as the result of some attempted stock market wrangling. He declared bankruptcy in 1923, lost his Piggly Wiggly empire and lost his unfinished Pink Palace mansion. We also explained how investors who bought Saunders' estate for the land eventually donated the mansion to the city of Memphis to be made into a museum.

From the Piggly Wiggly, we crossed the mezzanine to the mansion itself where there is a continuation of the cultural history of Memphis. There was a small display on the music of Memphis and on WWII.

There was also a display on the importance of cotton in Memphis. In 1931, Memphis and the rest of the country were in the throes of the Great Depression. A Memphis businessman proposed "cotton week" to promote the use of cotton. The Cotton Carnival, now called Carnival Memphis, was born. The carnival is held in the spring. It is a bit like Mardi Gras with parades, kings and queens, parties and a ball. It has been expanded to also include charitable events.

Costumes of past Carnival Memphis royalty

After we finished up in the mansion, we headed out to the mezzanine where there was one more exhibit to see. It was a temporary exhibit about insects called Twice Bitten. The exhibit featured several super-size insect heads including a bee depicted at 200 times actual size.

Bee 200 times actual size

There were also several gigantic, robotic insects including the praying mantis shown below.

Robotic praying mantis

Also included in the exhibit were about a dozen live tarantulas. The one shown below is a Mexican red knee.

Mexican red knee tarantula

After seeing the Twice Bitten exhibit, it was a little before 1:00, which was perfect timing for the 3D IMAX movie. The movie was on Jerusalem and was done by National Geographic, so the photography was excellent. It was interesting to see how Jerusalem became the focus of three major religions - Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

By the time the movie was over, it was almost 2:00, and we were hungry. As luck would have it, Central BBQ is right down the street from the Pink Palace.

Central BBQ

Central BBQ is our favorite place in Memphis to get ribs. Their ribs are prepared with dry rub. There are several kinds of sauce available - regular, mustard-based, vinegar-based and hot. We liked the regular, which is thick and sweet, mixed with vinegar-based sauce to cut the sweetness.

We had a slab of ribs for two for $25, which includes four sides. For our sides, we shared potato salad, onion rings, pork rinds, and mac and cheese. We usually like slaw with our barbecue, but we remembered from last year their slaw is a little too tart for our taste. The potato salad and onion rings were good, and the mac and cheese was okay. This was the first time either one of us had pork rinds, and we didn't care for them. The ribs, however, were delicious. They were smoky and meaty.

Margery with our slab of ribs

With our bellies full, we headed back to the motor home to relax the rest of the afternoon and evening and to watch the barges go up and down the river. Our time in Memphis was almost over. Stay tuned to find out where we headed next.

Pink Palace

West Memphis, AR - Events of Monday, June16, 2014

Almost all the sightseeing attractions in the Memphis area are closed on Mondays. It just so happens, however, there was one we wanted to see on this visit that was open. It was the Memphis Pink Palace Museum.

Grocery entrepreneur Clarance Saunders bought 155 acres of land in 1922 and began building a mansion. Pink Palace was the name given by local newspapers to the mansion because of the pink Georgian marble that was used for the facade.

Pink Place

Unfortunately, Saunders ran into difficulty with the stock market in 1923, went bankrupt, lost his grocery empire, and lost the mansion he was building before it could be completed. A group of real estate developers bought the estate, subdivided the land and resold it as smaller lots. No one was interested in the unfinished mansion, and the developers were eventually persuaded to donate the Pink Palace and 4 acres of land to the city of Memphis to be used as a museum. The museum, which specializes in the natural and the cultural history of the mid-south, opened to the public in 1930.

By 1977, the museum had run out of room, and work was begun on a new wing. Most of the museum's exhibits are now contained in the new section, but there are still a few exhibits, a ballroom and a large theater in the mansion itself.

In addition to the museum and mansion, there are also a planetarium and an IMAX theater. Admission to the museum alone is $12.75 for adults ($12.50 for seniors). Combo tickets that include the museum, planetarium and/or IMAX movie are also available. We opted to see the museum and the IMAX movie on Jerusalem for $18.75. We arrived a couple of hours ahead of the 1:00 start time for the movie so we would have time to see the museum first.

We started our museum tour with the natural history section located on the first floor. In the skeleton room where there were skeletons of birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and even humans on display. One skeleton we found particularly interesting was that of a python. The python, which was from the Memphis Zoo, died recently as the result of a feeding dispute with another python.

Skeleton of a python

The next area had displays of birds and mammals that are native to the mid-south.

Birds of prey

The museum also explored the world of microscopic organisms with a series of displays on the development of the microscope. Although simple magnifying lenses existed from as early as 1000 AD, the use of multiple lenses to create a compound microscope didn't take place until the 1600s.

Early microscope

The museum had several images of fleas representing the progress of microscopes over the years. The image at the left of the photo below is from an early microscope. It is little more than an enlarged shadow. The image in the center represents what we would expect to see with a modern optical microscope. To the right is an image from a modern electron scanning microscope. Click on the picture to enlarge it.

Microscope images (l to r) early microscope, modern optical microscope, modern electron scanning microscope

Another area of the museum had various displays of insects.

Butterflies and moths

The geology section featured numerous specimens of rocks, minerals and crystals from all over the world.

A few of the many specimens of rocks and minerals

There were also a couple of very large specimens on display like the two-foot quartz crystal shown below.

Two-foot tall quartz crystal

The geological area also featured an exhibit on earthquakes. We knew about the threat of earthquakes in California, the Pacific northwest, Alaska and Hawaii; but we were surprised to learn the area to the north of Memphis also has the threat of strong earthquakes as indicated by the red area in the center of the map below.

Earthquake threats - areas of potentially strong earthquakes shown in red

Another interesting display explained different types of fossils and how they are formed. Some fossils are castings of the original object that are formed when the object decays and mud fills the void left by the object and hardens. Some fossils are formed when minerals take the place of tissues in the original object (petrified wood is a good example), and some are impressions formed by traces of carbon left behind after the rest of the elements in an object decay.

Display showing different types of fossils

One of the largest fossils on display was a mosasaur, which is a large, extinct marine reptile.

Mosasaur fossil

And what would a natural history exhibit be without an animatronic dinosaur. The t. rex roars, sways its head and wags its tail.

Animatronic t. rex

After seeing the natural history section on the first floor, we still had plenty of time before the IMAX movie. That was a good thing because there was still much more to see. We'll tell you about the rest of our visit to the Pink Palace in our next post.

Summerdale, AL to Memphis, TN

West Memphis, AR - Events of Thursday, June 12 to Saturday, June 14, 2014

We pulled out of Rainbow Plantation around 9:00 a.m. on Thursday and had about a 5 hour drive to our overnight stop at Movietown RV Park in Canton, MS. We stayed there once before back in 2010.

Movietown RV is a nice RV park. It has gravel roads and pads with full hookups and 50/30 amp electric. Sites are mostly pull-throughs and are fairly wide with grass between. Even though the campground is conveniently located near the interstate, there is surprisingly little traffic noise - and there are NO trains!

Our site at Movietown RV

On this stop at Movietown RV, there were lots and lots of construction workers staying in the park. Most of their trailers were older, and there are quite a few unmarked trailers that look like the ones they used for temporary housing following Hurricane Katrina. However, most of the sites were fairly neat.

View of some of the other sites at Movietown RV

Apparently, the name of the RV park comes from the fact that quite a few movies have been filmed in the Canton area. Canton even has a movie office and a couple of movie museums.

We headed out again on Friday morning with a drive of about three hours to Tom Sawyer's RV Park in West Memphis, AR. West Memphis is located right across the Mississippi from Memphis, TN, and the RV park is located right on the river.

There are three groups of sites - one away from the river that has mostly pull-throughs with a few back-ins, one right on the river that has all pull-throughs where the front of the sites face the river (intended primarily for motor homes), and another right on the river that has all pull-throughs where the rear of the sites face the river (intended for 5th wheels).

The sites all have full hookups and 30/50-amp electric. Some of the sites are paved, but most are gravel. The paved sites right on the river cost $39 a night with a $4 discount for Good Sam, FMCA and Escapees. We got the weekly rate of $234 for our front-row, paved site.

Our front-row site at Tom Sawyer's RV Park

View up the row past our site

The roads at Tom Sawyer are somewhat dusty gravel. This year, they were coming around a couple of times a day and sprinkling water onto the roads which really helped immensely in keeping the dust down.

There is free Wi-Fi, but the signal where we were was pretty weak, and we got dumped off-line frequently. When the Wi-Fi did work, it was pretty slow. We used the campground Wi-Fi part of the time to save on our own data usage, but there was a strong Verizon 4G signal so we used that when the campground system bogged down in the late afternoon and early evening.

One of the reasons we like to stay at Tom Sawyer is the great view it has of the Mississippi River. The photo below is the view looking upriver toward Memphis from our site.

View from our site looking upriver toward Memphis

We occasionally like to sit on one of the benches they have along the riverbank and watch the barge traffic go by. The other great thing about a front row site is we can see the river right out the front window of the motor home. The photo at the top of the post and the one below give you an idea of what some of the river traffic looks like.

Barges heading upriver

One of the other reasons we like to come to the Memphis area is barbecue. We have tried numerous barbecue joints in Memphis, and our favorite for pulled/chopped pork in Memphis, or just about anywhere for that matter, is the Bar-B-Q Shop. We normally hang around the rig on weekends; but we couldn't wait to get some good, Memphis barbecue, so we headed to the Bar-B-Q Shop in Memphis for lupper on Saturday. The website for the Bar-B-Q Shop is a little confusing. As of this writing, it is actually the site where they sell their Dancing Pigs brand of barbecue sauce and dry rub. They are supposedly working on a new website that will give more info about the restaurant itself, including the menu.

The Bar-B-Q Shop

The pork at the Bar-B-Q Shop isn't real smoky, but it is always very moist and tender. Their sauce is a little on the tart side, and their cole slaw is a little on the sweet side. Together, they make a great combo. The crunch of the cole slaw also provides a nice contrast for the tender pork.

We both had chopped pork dinner plates ($10) with cole slaw. Margery had potato salad for her second side and Paul had barbecued beans. Everything was outstanding.

Ready to dig into our chopped pork dinners

We headed back to the motor home and spent the rest of Saturday watching barges go up and down the river. On Sunday, Paul got a nice Father's Day Skype call from Lora and J. Michael.

We headed out sightseeing on Monday. We'll tell you all about it in our next post.